tradingadviceblog.com » Emotional Clearing

Get Out The Big Guns for Transforming Your Trading

Mo — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 01:52:05 +0000

With my recent posts on emotional releasing, I’ve received quite a few emails from traders asking for advice. A common theme is asking what to do when you feel as through the emotions that are getting in the way of your trading success are so pervasive, so stubborn, you just don’t know if you can clear them. Its not uncommon if you’ve been trading for a while with consistent losses to have worn quite a deep groove of emotional scar tissue – a mixed bag of fear, shame, frustration and the like, which now gets triggered every time you are in the market. What is critical is that you are able to distinguish the cart from the horse. Is it your edge (or lack of one) that is causing you to fail, triggering these strong emotions? Or do you have a good edge but your emotions are getting in the way of trading it effectively? As I said in my recent post Desperate Traders Wanted, it is absolutely imperative if you are going to sort your trading out, that you are sure that you have an edge. You have to know your expectancy. Without that certainty you have no constant in your trading with which to be able to change your situation. This post is for those of you that have a quantifiable edge, you’ve tested it, and been able to trade it successfully on a simulator without the pressure of real money — but when you get into the live market, your emotions kick in and obscure your judgement, affecting your ability to implement your edge. So here you are, you’ve been struggling at it for a while. As a developing trader you’ve tried a number of different methods, and its taken you some time, possibly many months, even a few years to get to the point where you have reached a level of expertise, a level of certainty with your method – your edge. In that time, as a result of the learning process you’ve paid some fairly hefty tuition – in educational materials, in orderentry mistakes, in losses — losses as a result of a previous lack of edge, or losses caused by emotions that have affected your decision making, caused you to second guess yourself etc. As a result of this journey, you are now a bit over-sensitive — to money, to the potential of losing it, or perhaps to the pressure of getting it right. Performance anxiety is heightened because you’ve had so many experiences of losing, and that feeling is so familiar to you, that when you think about trading live, a part of you expects to fail again. What makes it so hard is that you know what to do, you are clear about your edge — and when you continue to fail, its no longer just the fear of losing, the fear of failing, its the fear that you aren’t in control of yourself. So you have a decision to make. Its going to take some work to change things, its going to take courage to look your emotions in the face and let them go. Its not hard, but it does take committment. Are you going to hang up your spurs and give up trading, or do the emotional work necessary? If you chose to forge ahead with tackling your emotions start by learning the clearing techniques. Practice them, get really comfortable with them. The great thing is that we have emotions about everything so there is plenty of material to practice with. If you are finding that your trading emotions are really strong you are going to need to clear them again and again. It may take a week or so, but you’ll find that gradually they have less and less power over you until they fade. Every day before trading I sit for at least 20 minutes with my eyes closed, turn inside and look at what I’m feeling. Am I nervous, did I lose yesterday and am I still carrying that? Am I afraid of something, frustrated or angry about something? Am I elated about something? The elation of winning can be just as dangerous as fear of losing. Whatever I’m feeling I release it using one of the techniques. Once I’ve done my pre market prep and I’m sitting in front of the screen, I take a few more minutes to clear. I think about starting to trade – does it bring up any anxiety? Clear it! Am I willing to make money for myself today? Any twinges inside? Clear it! Did I lose yesterday, any residual feelings about that? Clear it! And now I’m ready. I clear throughout the day while I’m trading – the Sedona Method is great for that, as its so simple. At the end of the day I clear anything that stayed or any longer term issues that I’m aware of. Any emotions that you are finding difficult to budge, use the Core Transformation technique. It is the emotional clearing big gun! It will clear pretty much anything! I wish you the best of luck and I invite you to stay in touch, ask questions, share how its going for you. The reason I focus this site on clearing for trading success is that its uncomplicated and it works! Mo

Simple, Practical Ways to Transform Your Difficult Trading Emotions and Improve Your Trading Overnight

Mo — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 13:19:37 +0000

As traders we’ve chosen an intense profession, one with a very high potential for stress. The simple act of putting our money on the line, with an uncertain outcome, creates an emotional force which we need to know how to handle. If we don’t, the emotional excitement of fear, euphoria, anger, disapointment, and other intense feelings, clouds our judgement and affects our ability to stay in the opportunity flow of the market. Trading with these emotions in play, is akin to driving in a storm without windshield wipers. We can’t see the road clearly, and accidents are very likely to happen! Here’s the good news. Learning to clear your emotions is easy, and pleasurable. You’ll feel such relief that you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it long ago. Your trading will be affected in dramatic ways, as you let go of the destructive results of trading while blinded. Not only that, but once transformed into positive feelings, you can use these new emotions to inspire you and find new enthusiasm for improving your trading skills. In this post, I’m going to tell you about two easy to learn techniques that get fantastic results! As Dr Brett Steenbarger reminds traders regularly, emotions aren’t bad. Some of the best traders are very emotional. They use that energy to drive their performance and to continually improve. The fact is that we can’t get rid of emotions even if we want to. Unless you are a Vulcan, you are going to have emotions! The key is learning how to work with them, and transform them so that they are a positive force. While many of us have learned or are learning the technical skills of trading, the area of emotional management is something that many traders overlook in their eduction. Its sad really that we’re not taught how to work with our emotions as kids. Most of us learnt quite the opposite, how to escape or push down our emotions through television, food, exercise, drugs or in other ways. And now after many years of practice we are all expert at avoiding the pain of difficult emotions. But avoiding doesn’t help. The emotions are still there stored as stress in our body, and waiting in our subconscious for the right trigger to come out again. Its time for a change. Before you get gung ho with the emotional clearing, first here’s a really important point. Our emotions are trying to tell us something. Its critical that we don’t avoid or even transform our emotions without first finding out what they are trying to tell us. All the positive thinking and feeling in the world will not help you if you don’t have a trading edge. Take a look at 10 Ways to Deconstruct Your Trading and Build a Better Plan and 10 More Ways to Deconstruct Your Trading and Build a Better Plan if you need help with that. Now let’s take a look at emotional clearing. In general I’ve found that there are two types of clearing that I need to do. One type is quick, short term clearing of emotions while I’m trading. And the other type is clearing out older, longer term emotions that may be affecting my perspective, or causing a slump etc. I use two different techniques, one called the Sedona Method which I use for short term clearing. Its quick, effective and easy to use even while you are trading. And if you want to start by learning just one technique, you can also use this for longer term clearing as well. There’s nothing scary involved. No voodoo, brainwashing or electrodes! You simply ask yourself a series of questions which causes a release of emotion. In fact, the Sedona Method is so simple, that on first sight you may wonder how something so basic can work so well. I don’t know why, but I do know that it works amazingly, and that it has been validated and proven to work in studies by the Harvard Medical School. To do the technique in its simplest form, you first learn to just let the emotion be there, without fighting it, without running away from it. Then you ask yourself three questions. “Could I let it go?”, “Would I?”, “When?”. Once you have learned the subtleties of the technique, its that easy. Now imagine that you are trading. You place a trade, and get stopped out at a loss. That loss brings up strong emotions for you, which clouds your perspective. You are so caught up in feeling bad about your losing trade that you miss the next opportunity just a few minutes later, a trade which would have been very profitable. Rewind: Imagine that you are trading. You place a trade, and get stopped out at a loss. That loss brings up strong emotions for you. You quickly run through the Sedona Method and clear the emotion. Your perspective is clear and you immediately see the next opportunity and are able to respond to it. Your emotional clearing skill has supported a profitable trade. In this situation, I would also follow up at the end of the day by doing a deeper clearing to clear whatever it is that is causing the extreme reaction to losing. For this I’d use a technique called Core Transformation. It also involves a simple and easy to learn series of questions that you ask yourself in order to communicate with the part of you that is feeling the intense emotion. You learn to identify what that part wants for you, and then continue to guide it through simple questionning to its core state – very positive energy. Like every trader I’ve had hundreds, probably thousands of experiences of feeling strong emotions before, during or after a trade which I’ve been able to quickly transform into a calm, positive, opportunistic state in which I can see the market much more clearly. By using these two clearing techniques I’ve found that I’m much better prepared to execute each trade as a unique opportunity, and to maintain a positive approach to developing as a trader. I hope you find this beneficial and get as much pleasure from emotional clearing as I do. It feels great to be clear! If you’d like to learn the Sedona Method properly, I recommend starting with the Sedona Method book. You can also read FAQ’s here. If you are interested in finding out more about Core Transformation you can read the book Core Transformation or learn the method in detail through the DVD of the training course. All the best! Mo tradingadviceblog.com

4 Ways to Survive and Thrive in These Market Conditions

Mo — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 15:19:26 +0000

Whether you’ve ridden the roller coaster of the past few weeks for profit, been bashed and bruised by the volatility, or sat on the sidelines and waited, this has been an intensely emotional time for traders and investors everywhere. Here is some practical trading advice for getting yourself into the best mental and emotional state for maximizing the opportunities of the coming weeks. First here’s a reminder of the bottom-line on mental/emotional dynamics that every trader needs to know: As human beings our brains are hard wired to block information to protect us from emotional pain. If we are experiencing stress, anxiety, and other forms of upset, our brains begin to shut down awareness. We begin to experience what experts call perceptual blindness – unable to see what is staring us in the face – causing us to make poor trading decisions, and lose money. In other words, our brains are not naturally designed for successful trading. As traders we must have a mental methodology, a system of thinking (in addition to our trading system/methods) to counteract our inherent mental processing. If you don’t, there is a very high likelihood that you will be defeated not by the market, but by your own brain! Here are some of the most effective methods highlighted by leaders in the field such as Mark Douglas and Brett Steenbarger. Mental Strategy In his two trading books, the The Disciplined Trader and Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas outlines a series of key mental strategies that take the fear and stress out of trading, and allow you to develop the relaxed state of awareness in which you can take full advantage of the opportunities that the market is presenting: 1) Risk Acceptance When you know in advance how much you stand to lose if your edge doesn’t pan out in a particular trade; when you fully accept the possibility that you may lose that amount as part of the ratio of wins to losses in trading your methodology – then there is nothing that can hurt you, or cause you any psychological pain. We’ve been taught that you can be successful if you have a positive mental attitude. And that’s true. But many traders make the mistake of believing that having a positive attitude means always thinking about winning. Thinking about losing is bad, defeatist, so they avoid thinking about losing. Successful traders however, think in terms of probabilities. They know that there will be wins and losses. They have learned how to think about their losses and about risk. Its in the acceptance of risk, not the avoidance, that they maintain a healthy and positive mind. The fear and stress that many traders feel particularly at times like this, is caused by the fact that they aren’t comfortable with the fact that they may lose. The fear you may feel is actually your mind and body struggling to ignore reality; ignore the part of you that knows damn well that you will lose because its an inevitable part of trading. Because many traders don’t accept the risk ahead of placing a trade they experience the pain of loss – not because of the actual money gone from their account, but because they are suddenly confronted with a reality that they have been avoiding. They didn’t confront the possibility that they might lose. Here are some strategies that I use to help me accept the risk of each trade: While I’m preparing for a trade and evaluating where to place my stop, I ask myself “How much am I willing to spend to find out if my trading method, my edge, will work for this trade?”. Another variant on this question which helps avoid over trading is “Am I willing to spend (whatever your stop loss will be) to find out if my edge will work for this trade?”. This simple approach causes you to think very carefully about the expectancy of your method and the state of the market. It will help you to get clear about whether your method does have an edge in this kind of volatile market. Or it may prompt you to stay on the sidelines and preserve capital. The idea is that before you get into a trade you have quantified how much you can lose and you really are willing to let go of that money. You know that despite your edge, the market can do whatever it wants and that there is reasonable chance that you may lose. If you choose to enter the trade, mentally you have to accept that your risk money is gone. Its spent. You no longer have the money you are risking. You have to reach the place inside where that’s OK – so that you can then approach the trade without any fear of losing that money. I like to think of it as though I’m buying a lottery ticket. My risk, my stop, is the money I’ve spent to buy the ticket to find out whether the trade will be profitable. I may win, in which case I get a refund, or I may lose in which case I wont. I’ve really no idea since the market can do anything, but mentally I’ve spent the money to find out. 2) You Don’t Need to be Right to Make Money You have to do the mental work to let go of the need to know what is going to happen next or the need to be right on each trade. In fact the degree to which you think you know, assume you know, or in any way need to know what is going to happen next, is equal to the degree to which you will fail as a trader. Mark Douglas The most successful traders have found a way to inoculate themselves from the stress of trading, and from the outcome of their most recent trades. Here’s how they do it: They have an unshakable belief in the fact that 1) While the outcome of any given trade is uncertain they believe in their edge over a series of trades. In other words they know the expectancy of their method and have confidence that over a series of random outcomes, the odds are in their favor. 2) Anything can happen! In other words they have learned to think of every trade like tossing a coin – they don’t need to know what will happen. They don’t expect to either win or lose. This firm belief in the uncertainty of any given trade, while knowing that over a series of trades you will be profitable, is very liberating. When you learn the mental discipline of letting go of the result of any individual trade you keep your mind in a state where it can easily perceive the opportunities that the market is offering. It is not distracted by focusing on your expectations of what you think should happen – it can perceive what is most likely to happen. The Body/Mind Connection 3) Biofeedback You can influence your state of mind, your focus, your ability to enter the zone, by being aware of your body – particularly your breathing. There is a great software program which I use called Emwave which you can run on your computer as you are trading. You attach a sensor either to your earlobe or finger – and it tells you what kind of mental/emotional state you are in by measuring your body’s activity. With this program you can easily train yourself, through breathing and watching your posture, to stay calm and in the zone even in the most stressful situations. When you are in that calm state you’re most in tune with the market, and most ready to take advantage of the opportunities the market is offering. I highly recommend that you experiment with seeing the difference in your trading results between days when you use Emwave to trade ‘in the zone’ and when you operate in your normal (probably slightly stressful) state of awareness. Its quite surprising! Emotional Clearing 4) Clearing As always I recommend that traders learn how to continually clear their emotions using simple clearing techniques so that the build up of emotion, either negative or positive, doesn’t distract you from your focus. Have a great and safe week ahead! Mo

What is emotional clearing and how do you do it?

Mo — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 18:11:31 +0000

After a number of posts in which I refer to emotional clearing, I’ve been receiving emails asking for more explanation – so here goes: We all have emotions, fear, anger, guilt, worry, shame etc. Traders and investors who are putting hundreds and thousands of dollars on the line each day are more prone than most to facing these intense emotions. Fear of being wrong, a fear of losing money, fear of missing out, and fear of leaving money on the table are the big ones. But then there are also emotions connected with self-worth, with how you judge and value yourself, with perfectionism. These have an enormous impact on your ability to be consistently profitable – to take money out of the market and keep it! These strong emotions are within us in the form of energy. Traders have tried therapy, medication, exercise and myriad other ways to address these emotions – yet the most effective way to deal with them is to transform their energy from negative into positive. The positive energy then becomes a force for the good in your trading. Once you know how to do it, its remarkeably easy. Once you begin to clear these emotions you’ll find that gradually over time as new ones arise they have less and less hold over you – you begin to master yourself. The beauty of emotions – is that their energy can easily be transformed into quite the opposite of what you were originally feeling. The reason for that is that the part of you that is feeling the emotion – doesn’t really want to feel bad, quite the opposite in fact. That part of you mistakenly thought that it was helping you by kicking up an emotion that would either warn you, or convince you to do something different. When you learn the technique of emotional clearing using Core Transformation you learn how to identify what that part of you really wants, and quickly convert the negative emotion into its ‘core’ state – which is usually a feeling of peace, love, joy, tranquility or just being OK with things. Core Transformation is a simple and easy to learn series of questions that you ask yourself in order to communicate with the part of you that is feeling the emotion. You learn to identify what that part wants for you, and then continue to guide it through simple questionning back to its core state – very positive energy. You then simply reverse the process and allow this positive energy to clean out the negative charge that was originally in place. I’ve had hundreds of experiences of feeling strong emotions before, during or after a trade which I’ve been able to quickly transform into a calm, positive, opportunistic state in which I can see the market much more clearly. In this way I’m much better prepared to execute each trade as a unique opportunity. If you are interested in finding out more about Core Transformation you can read the book Core Transformation or learn the method in detail through the DVD of the training course. Enjoy!

How To Put Your Past Failures Behind You And Move On To Trading Success

Mo — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:14:57 +0000

In the early days of trading, I once lost $1600 overnight because I made a mistake and left two contracts open. Another time I lost $400 and then another $1500 on a mad binge trying to get the $400 back. It was painful. Gut twisting, panic inducing, emotional hell. Not only in the moment. The pain stayed with me, haunted me, sapped my self-confidence, and left me feeling doomed as a trader – leading to further emotionally driven mistakes.

If this feels familiar, I have some good news! It doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s some trading advice to help.

Emotion is heady stuff. And in our game – trading and investment – where the risks are high, unless we learn effective emotional clearing strategies its very easy to fall foul of the dark clouds of fear, greed, jealousy, panic, and more. These emotions, pervade the mind, clouding judgment, and clog up the intuitive faculties.

When you are learning to trade, and inevitably make mistakes, the last thing you need is to get bogged down in the emotions of the mistake. You want to be able to pick yourself up, shake yourself off, and move on, without any retained baggage.

Lets face it, trading is difficult enough as it. Its hard enough focusing on the many variables of your trading system and the market, without operating at only a fraction of your capacity because your mind – your conscious awareness – has numbed itself into a fog out of fear. We need to be clear, we need to be alert, we need to be confident.

What I discovered for myself, was that when I learned how to clear my emotions – my mistakes, my over trading, my inability to follow my system, corrected itself. With a clear mind, I was able to be much more objective, and disciplined, I was able to draw the full potential out of my system and become a consistently profitable trader. And I tell you what, I was a hell of a lot happier!

All the things that have happened to us in the past are retained within our subconscious as memories. This pretty obvious, right? What is surprising though is that in the present moment, when we’re feeling bad about something, experiencing fear of something, we believe it. We buy into it and believe its real. We’re not able to witness what is going on and say “huh, this has just triggered an old memory which is making me feel afraid, its not real”. Try it sometime. See if you can catch yourself feeling bad about something, and see if you can attribute it to an old memory, and then drop it.”

In one of my previous posts Clearing The Way for Trading Success I introduced two powerful techniques for emotional clearing. In particular, Core Transformation – based on the techniques of Neuro Linguistic Programming is absolutely astonishing in its effectivness. If you learn the technique and make a genuine effort to practice it, and it doesn’t work for you, I’ll eat my hat!

The moral here is don’t let your trading mistakes continue to haunt you. Start fresh every day, continually clear your emotions, set a fresh intention for success every day. Monitor yourself – you’ll learn to see when you are in a positive, optimistic frame of mind that attracts success, or when you are in a negative frame of mind, that activates your worst, and attracts loss. Choose to be successful, its in your hands!

Clearing the way for trading success

Mo — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 19:05:39 +0000

What’s standing between you and consistent profitability? Even having found a method that others use profitably, many traders still struggle to turn a profit, using exactly the same method. If you’ve read some of my early blog posts you’ll know that this was my own painful experience. Having overcome it and gone on to make a consistent income from trading, I’d like to share this trading advice with you. Like many others before me, I made the huge and very expensive mistake of underestimating the role of emotions when it comes to trading. I spent more than a year and many thousands of dollars perfecting, testing, and practicing a profitable trading method. Only problem was, when I traded it with real money, I found that rather than executing the method with calm and poise, I turned into an over-trading, reactive, emotional trading disaster! No kidding. In the years that have followed, I’ve searched for and found solutions to these trading issues. I’ve discovered, adapted, practiced and continue to practice techniques that have not only transformed my trading, but my whole outlook on life. I urge you to try it for yourself. You don’t need to have a degree in psychology, you don’t need to retire to a cave for deep introspection, you just need some simple to learn techniques to clear out old emotional baggage that is affecting you now. Let me illustrate this with an example. Suppose 5 years ago you invested thousands of dollars in a business and you lost it all when the business folded. It was painful to lose all that money, you felt it in your gut, as a constriction in your chest, a sense of panic, anger, and fear. Unless you have a method for emotional clearing that emotional pain will have stayed with you. You may not have had such a major loss, it could be a string of small losses when you were first trading, it could be that a friend or family member lost money that affected you, it could be a painful emotional memory that has nothing to do with money. The chances are that you don’t even consciously remember it. Now you’re trading. As you again risk your money, as your emotions heighten with the excitement – that part of you with the emotional memory of losing money – the fear, panic, and dread – is reactivated. Its as fresh and painful as if it happened yesterday. Suddenly your not the clear headed, rational person you were when you were practicing. The emotional memory of fear clouds your judgment – perhaps you’re afraid to pull the trigger, perhaps you over-trade or judge bad entries. Perhaps you cut winning trades short out of fear of losing your profits. However this clouded judgment manifests, the root of your problems isn’t in the here and now. Its an old emotional memory from five years ago. It has nothing to do with your method, its like an emotional veil that clouds your reason. The two powerful methods that I recommend work in conjunction with each other. One is a method that you can use at anytime of the day, while you are trading or doing something else. The other is deeper and more powerful for releasing old emotional memories, but you have to stop and give your attention to the clearing process. It could be used between trades or for clearing issues that have come up while trading, at a later time. Method One is taught by Joe Vitale in his book Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace, and More. Its a traditional technique from Hawaii – called Ho’oponopono. Don’t be freaked out by the name – it works! The second technique with its roots in Neuro Linguistic Programming is called Core Transformation: Reaching the Wellspring Within and is taught by Connirae Andreas. Its totally mindblowingly fantastic – not just for trading but for feeling great all the time! The teachers themselves do a much better job of explaining these techniques than I can ever do – but I do make you a promise. If you try these techniques properly and give them a chance to work for you, you’ll be grateful for the rest of your life. Once you learn these methods you also learn to begin to identify the particular emotional patterns that are causing your issues. You’ll be able to see them and clear them. You trading will improve exponentially as you trade ‘clear’ of distortions and execute your profitable method without hesitation. method that is really effective and Update: I’ve recently found another clearing method that can be used anytime, especially while trading. Its called the Sedona Method. Here are all three methods: